Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

of principles and rules to guide the treatment of enemies that were quite specific.
The bottom line was that domestic law enforcement developed one set of rules
and guidelines; those who dealt with military security were left with only the Law
of Armed Combat, which is based on rules pertaining to conventional warfare and
therefore difficult to apply to genocide, international crime, and/or terrorism.
Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, in The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War
Against Al Queda, discuss the development of U.S. intelligence and interrogation
capabilities during and after World War II. “In July 1940, a month after German
troops entered Paris, the army issued its first field manual on interrogation, or more
specifically, on the “examination of enemy personnel, repatriates, documents and
material.” The 28-page manual described and warned interrogators to observe
the Geneva Conventions’ ban on coercion. There was no mention of anything
resembling the distinct approaches outlined in today’s interrogation manuals.
Indeed, about the only guidance it offered on method was that “a cigarette or a
cup of coffee will frequently elicit more accurate and important information than
threats.” 9 In 1942, the U.S. Army opened its first centralized intelligence training
center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland; its first priority was to train interrogators and
the students learned personality analysis, ways of influencing people and making
friends (the Dale Carnegie approach applied to war prisoners.)
Since the early 1950s, the U.S. military has trained professional interrogators
and taught specific ways of “educing” information from unwilling sources. It
was assumed that the information needed was of a military-engagement type
– assuming “conventional warfare” (although realizing that Vietnam clearly falls
out of this category). The methods used were a combination of those developed
from the oral histories of professional interrogators from World War II, the Korean
Conflict, and Vietnam. The other component was the list of ways of conducting
interrogation as described in KUBARK and mostly Army training documents
such as Field Manual 34-52 (1992). Some of the training, especially at SERE
(Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) schools, was highly creative and
designed to help soldiers resist interrogation and torture. The infamous “dog on
a leash” tactic was ostensibly created to show that “nothing can take away your
dignity.”
This background brings us to the present work on Educing Information,
Interrogation: Science and Art, which has four chapters devoted to an overview
and analysis of U.S. interrogators, techniques, and procedures since World War II.
The authors review what we think we know, yet wonder about what we really do
not know. Further, the authors note that although some interrogators are formally
trained in the techniques, there is no evidence that those techniques actually do
what they are supposed to do.
Chapters 5 and 6 of this book describe how current eduction is conducted
and note that although there is no valid scientific research to back the conclusion,
9
Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Queda (New
York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), 27.
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